When David and I were first planning our trip to London, I commented that this is the first time we've gone to London without the need to purchase any antiques. His response was "well...there are those side tables in the living room...".

For some reason, David became concerned that he wasn't going to make platinum this year. He always operates under the assumption that he doesn't travel much. We planned a short week in London as an easy way to rack up some miles and figured we could see some shows, visit the countryside and bum around London.

Our next stop was Dover to see the castle and the white cliffs. It looked from the map that we could wakl to the castle. However, when we got to Dover we had two obstacles: although we could clearly see the castle from the middle of town, we couldn't figure out how to walk to it; and secondly, it looked like quite a hike up a cliff to get to the castle. We were already pretty tired, so we hired a cab. We learned that our fears were well founded. We never would have found it and the ride was pretty long and steep.

David and I took the day flight to London, as opposed to the red-eye, to help with jet lag. Our flight was around 8:30pm, it's about a 6 hour flight, and you arrive in London around 8:30pm. I can't think through the math right now to know if that's right. Perhaps I'm conditioned from many previous red-eye flights, but whenever I arrive in Europe, I'm exhausted. I don't know what it is about sitting on a plane for more than a few hours.

Our next day in London, David was chomping at the bit to go to Oxford. I told him that there was no way were getting on a train and fighting weekend crowds again. I would be up for a boat ride, but we had a hard time finding a boat trip that would go that far up the Thames.

We didn't have much time on our last full day. I wanted to do just a little bit of shopping and David wanted to visit St. Paul's Cathedral. We decided that we could easily do both. I had found a store on the internet that sold Indian things and there was a music store that specialized in musicals and soundtracks that were near each other. We took the underground to close to the neighborhood, but left a lot of time for walking. It was a nice day for it.

The Thames boat ride stopped in Greenwich where we disembarked. Greenwich is a small community with cafes, shops, an antiques market, the Royal Observatory, and a whole bunch of other things. You can visit this website for more information. We didn't do half of the things listed there.

The next two days in London were dedicated to shopping. And also to relaxing a bit. We had toured pretty hard, and we were now starting to settle into vacation mode. The first day of shopping, we focused on Kensington. We wanted to do Harvey Nichols, Harrod's, and try to find an antique map store that David had been to a few years ago. We started our journey with a walk through Hyde Park and Kensinton Gardens.

David and I got up relatively early to catch a train to go to Canterbury. It felt like we could have slept for days. England has a fantastic train system. You can get pretty much anywhere you need to get to by train and they run on time. The only drawback on taking the trains going south during the summer is that you're getting family beach crowds. We got stuck next to two loud groups on the train, but that didn't stop us from getting a little nap in on the way there.